That U.S. Rep. Mike Slanker, R-Nev., is sure smart. His front man, former insurance salesman Jon Porter, has taken advantage of Slanker’s congressional franking privilege to send a two-sided flier that purports to be about Medicare, but is really an election vehicle. How can we tell? By a simple application of the Photo-Matic Taxpayer Abuse Scale, Version 2.0, of course!

By running the flier — which you can see on my colleague Jon Ralston’s blog here — through the Photo-Matic’s scanner, we discover that there are three photos of Porter in the flier, or 1.5 photos per page. Using a complex, proprietary algorithm, we deduce that … it’s a taxpayer-financed campaign piece!

And isn’t that something? Slanker, who’s $1 million ahead of Democratic challenger Tessa Hafen, feels the need to use taxpayer money to gain an additional advantage. Oh, sure, we know that plenty of people running for Congress do this (and by plenty, we mean everybody, Democrat and Republican). But that doesn’t make it right, as they say. If the rest of the Republican leadership jumped off a cliff, would Slanker’s front man do the same thing?

Oh, that’s right. He would.